Dull L. A. Skyline in for a Change
The dullest segment of the popular television series “L.A. Law” has to be the opening tease that offers glimpses of the city’s downtown skyline.
The sad fact is that the architecture of most of the office buildings that form the downtown skyline is uninspired, and not what one would expect for a city the size, stature and, especially, the spirit of Los Angeles.
Of course, Los Angeles was never meant to be a city of high-rises, but rather a horizontal collection of small towns in a grand Arcadian dream. Indeed, during the first half of the century when gloriously sculpted skyscrapers were rising in New York and Chicago, structures here were limited to 13 stories, with the exception of the City Hall and the Federal Building.
And when that limit was lifted in the 1950s and the skyline started to grow, it was in the severe Modern-style mold: boxy and boring, cold and corporate. Not helping was a city ordinance requiring flat roofs to accommodate helicopter landing pads.
While a few of the recent additions to the skyline have been more sophisticated--notably the red-granite, polygonal Crocker Center complex designed by the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill--the bland, conservative look that we see in “L.A. Law” dominates.
But that look, happily, may be changing as indicated recently by the dedication of one building, the ground breaking for another and the announcement of a third. Each in its way promises a more architecturally interesting downtown.
Dedicated earlier this month was 1000 Wilshire, located just east of the Harbor Freeway between Wilshire Boulevard and 7th Street. The 485,000-square-foot structure was designed by the New York-based firm of Kohn Pederson Fox, in association with the Los Angeles firm of Langdon Wilson Mumper Architects.
Working with the Reliance Development Group, headed by a relentless Henry Lambert, the architects have fashioned a building that, in a welcomed contrast to its bland neighbors, lends the skyline some verve.
Whatever the style might be called--it has been arbitrarily labeled Post Modern--the structure makes the most of its site by presenting a provocatively clad and shaped facade, an engaging entrance gate and plaza, and an elegant lobby detailed in marble.
The light-gray granite facade with accents of black granite and black glass form articulated fenestrations in varying combinations from different perspectives to provide the 21-story building a distinctive rhythm. And though the banding of the building seems to this eye a bit heavy, it is striking, particularly at night, when, among other things, the classical style penthouse is lit up.
As for the sign on the building, even though it was chiseled into granite and not stuck on in the form of a billboard, I still think it is tacky, like putting labels on the rear of jeans. You would think the building’s architecture was enough of a signature for Coast Savings.
Promising to be the signature building for all of downtown is Library Tower, the ground for which was broken last week at 5th and Hope streets. The 1.5-million-square-foot structure was designed for the Maguire Thomas Partners with elan by Henry Cobb and Harold Fredenburgh of the firm of I. M. Pei & Partners.
Certainly, the tapered, crown-topped circular structure, clad in a pale rose marble and rising 1,017 feet (73 stories) in a series of setbacks, to be the city’s tallest--indeed the tallest in the West--promises to provide the Los Angeles skyline a stylish focal point it has long lacked.
As with so many other designs by the prolific Pei office, there is nothing modest about the tower. It makes a bold statement, and whether the windows and fenestrations might be too monotonous and the scale too much for the site, judgment must await the project’s completion, scheduled for late 1989.
But even more exciting and potentially affecting more people and the city’s image is a stairway following the western curve of the base of the office tower from Hope to 5th streets. Designed with a flourish by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, the steps will be graced with a cascading water garden, and marked by terraces providing space for outdoor cafes, lounging and people watching.
The steps also will provide a vital link in a proposed pedestrian network unifying downtown from Bunker Hill to South Park. Critical to this marvelous concept is the development of the library’s west lawn.
Unfortunately, the plan for the lawn has been dropped from the first phase of the renovation and expansion of the Central Library, which is tied to the development of the office tower in a complex financial package involving the transfer of air rights.
The lawn was squeezed out by an excessive program embraced by the library and an excessive scheme fashioned to accommodate it by the architectural firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer. Both the program and the scheme need to be reduced, in the interest of the budget, the scale of the landmark library as originally designed by Bertram Goodhue, and the lawn.
This is no time for the library board to get greedy or the architects vain. No one wants to delay the library project, but at the same time no one wants to see mistakes made that will haunt it and the city for generations.
The third project promising to bring some diversity to the city skyline is Gateway Center, an imaginative mix of office, hotel and residential uses proposed in a 40-story structure at Temple and Figueroa streets, just southeast of the Hollywood and Harbor Freeway interchange.
Less a gateway than a bloated blade, topped by a helipad shaped like a giant steel suction cup, the center was designed by Kisho Kurokawa of Tokyo, in association with the local firm of Langdon Wilson Mumper Arcitects. It should, if developed as planned, give drivers at the interchange something to study when caught in a traffic jam (traffic jams, no doubt, that the project’s 1,200-car parking lot will contribute to.)
Despite Kurokawa’s convoluted rationalizations, which he delivered a few weeks ago in a protracted discussion of his architectural philosophy of symbiosis, the design of the project as revealed in a model seems strained.
While the “look” is interesting--a curtain wall of glass, aluminum and granite woven over a steel frame--the structure is sited as if on a distant plane, not on the edge of a burgeoning downtown or adjacent to a bulging freeway interchange. The siting can use a little more sensitivity.
(But such sensitivity does not seem to be Kurokawa’s forte. Judging from his work I have seen in Japan and now on view in an exhibit at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Exposition Park through July 13, he seems more into architectural statements.)
The Gateway project being developed by the Naiman Co. of San Diego, in partnership with Aoki Corp. of Japan and TSA International of Hawaii, might serve well the city’s emerging skyline, but not necessarily its users, or downtown.
